Free The Middleman and Other Stories by Bharati Mukherjee

or something, and their marriage was a kind of taming of the West, and that everything about her could be explained as a cultural deficiency. Actually, Vic could talk beautifully about his feelings. He’d brew espresso, pour it into tiny blue pottery cups and analyze our relationship. I should have listened. I mean really listened. I thought he was talking about us, but I know now he was only talking incessantly about himself. I put too much faith in mail-order nightgowns and bras.
    â€œYour mama wanted me out of the house,” Dad goes on. “She didn’t used to be like this, Renata.”
    Renata and Carla are what we were christened. We changed to Rindy and Cindi in junior high. Danny didn’t have to make such leaps, unless you count dropping out of Montclair State and joining the Marines. He was always Danny, or Junior.
    I lug the turkey to the kitchen sink where it can drip away at a crazy angle until I have time to deal with it.
    â€œYour mama must have told you girls I’ve been acting funny since I retired.”
    â€œNo, Dad, she hasn’t said anything about you acting funny.” What she
has
said is do we think she ought to call Doc Brunetti and have a chat about Dad? Dad wouldn’t have to know. He and Doc Brunetti are, or were, on the same church league bowling team. So is, or was, Vic’s dad, Vinny Riccio.
    â€œYour mama thinks a man should have an office to drive to every day. I sat at a desk for thirty-eight years and what did I get? Ask Doc, I’m too embarrassed to say.” Dad told me once Doc—his real name was Frankie, though no one ever called him that—had been called Doc since he was six years old and growing up with Dad in Little Italy. There was never a time in his life when Doc wasn’t Doc, which made his professional decision very easy. Dad used to say, no one ever called me Adjuster when I was a kid. Why didn’t they call me something like Sarge or Teach? Then I would have known better.
    I wish I had something breakfasty in my kitchen cupboard to offer him. He wants to stay and talk about Mom, which is theway old married people have. Let’s talk about me means: What do you think of Mom? I’ll take the turkey over means: When will Rindy settle down? I wish this morning I had bought the Goodwill sofa for ten dollars instead of letting Vic haul off the fancy deck chairs from Fortunoff’s. Vic had flash. He’d left Jersey a long time before he actually took off.
    â€œI can make you tea.”
    â€œNone of that herbal stuff.”
    We don’t talk about Mom, but I know what he’s going through. She’s just started to find herself. He’s not burned out, he’s merely stuck. I remember when Mom refused to learn to drive, wouldn’t leave the house even to mail a letter. Her litany those days was: when you’ve spent the first fifteen years of your life in a mountain village, when you remember candles and gaslight and carrying water from a well, not to mention holding in your water at night because of wolves and the unlit outdoor privy, you
like
being housebound. She used those wolves for all they were worth, as though imaginary wolves still nipped her heels in the Clifton Mall.
    Before Mom began to find herself and signed up for a class at Paterson, she used to nag Cindi and me about finding the right men. “Men,” she said; she wasn’t coy, never. Unembarrassed, she’d tell me about her wedding night, about her first sighting of Dad’s “thing” (“Land ho!” Cindi giggled. “Thar she blows!” I chipped in.) and she’d giggle at our word for it, the common word, and she’d use it around us, never around Dad. Mom’s peasant, she’s earthy but never coarse. If I could get that across to Dad, how I admire it in men or in women, I would feel somehow redeemed of all my little mistakes with them, with men, with myself. Cindi and Brent were married